Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Richard Stallman writes:

 > Do people write spam/virus checkers using Guile?

I don't know.  Why do you care?  The example is valid, and they
*might*, in which case they need conservative (conformant when
conformance is implied by names, such as "UTF-8") behavior.  If such a
user discovers that Guile emits nonconformant UTF-8, they'll surely
have to wonder what other security holes they've imported by simply
selecting Guile as an application platform.

To put it another way, Mark said that Guile is intended to be useful
writing servers as well as interactive programs.  Spam checking is
simply a convenient example of a daemon application where undefined
behavior can easily result in undesired output.

However, the general principle is that undefined behavior can
sometimes be exploited, and therefore processes that run unattended
should have *all* their behavior defined.

This doesn't necessarily apply to Emacs, although I think it should.